Monday, March 31, 2014

So why did Alice in Arabia spark such a [negative] response? The premise seemed to be ripped out of a movie from the 1980s: a young American teenager is kidnapped by her extended Saudi Arabian family and imprisoned on their compound. Our heroine “must count on her independent spirit and wit to find a way to return home while surviving life behind the veil.”

Even I raised my concerns in a telephone conversation with an ABC Family executive on Thursday. The ABC official explained that they had tackled other touchy subjects in a respectful way as in the case of its show The Fosters which features a same-sex couple raising a multicultural group of children. But when I asked: “Were any of the children on The Fosters kidnapped and forced to stay in the family like in Alice in Arabia?,” I was met with a moment of silence, followed by assurances thatAlice would be nuanced.
The outcry escalated Friday whenBuzzFeed released a version of the pilot script and reported that it’s, “dotted with cultural inaccuracies and stereotypes.” For example, one of the show’s characters refers to the mixed ethnicity of “Alice” as, “half Jew-loving monkey.”

By Friday night, ABC Family apparently had enough: “The current conversation surrounding our pilot was not what we had envisioned and is certainly not conducive to the creative process, so we’ve decided not to move forward with this project.”

Some are ecstatic by this swift cancelation. I’m not. I would’ve preferred that ABC Family first met with people in the Middle Eastern and Muslim-American communities to try and make the show work. If the premise had been tweaked to eliminate the kidnapping angle, it very well could've become a fair showcase of Arabs and Muslims.And “fair” is all I want. I’m not looking for a PSA, but rather a TV show that features the good and the bad in our community...

Oh, you mean like, say, showcasing tasty samosas and jihad? Yeah, I'm sure that, in the absence of the kidnapping angle, that would have done the job.

(Hit the road, John, we don't want your con No more, no more, no more, no more.)(Hit the road, John, we don't want your con no more.)What you say?(Hit the road, John, we don't want your con No more, no more, no more, no more.)(Hit the road, John, we don't want your con no more.)Oh, Kerry, oh, Kerry,You're clueless and weak.You don't know a single thing of which you speak.We wish you would give it a rest'Cuz that would be for the best (that's right!).(Hit the road, John, we don't want your con No more, no more, no more, no more.)(Hit the road, John, we don't want your con no more.)What you say?(Hit the road, John, we don't want your con No more, no more, no more, no more.)(Hit the road, John, we don't want your con no more.)Now Kerry, listen Kerry, Abbas ain't no good.He'll never make peace even if he could.If only you knew the scoreYou wouldn't come back encore (that's French).(Hit the road, John, we don't want your con No more, no more, no more, no more.)(Hit the road, John, we don't want your con no more.)What you say?(Hit the road, John, we don't want your con No more, no more, no more, no more.)(Hit the road, John, we don't want your con no more.)...

is the most beautiful dog breed in existence. It seems I'm in the minority, though. Apparently, there's something called "black dog syndrome," and it makes people shun black dogs in particular because they're black.I say: Resist the syndrome! Black pooches rock!Update: Black beauties, a photo series.

Iranians have launched an unprecedented attack on the country’s government – for not behaving more like Israel.

The criticism of President Rouhani's administration came following the news that an Iranian soldier taken hostage by militants in Pakistan had been killed.

Angry Iranians took to social media to condemn the Islamic Republic’s failure to rescue the soldier, comparing its apparent inaction unfavourably with Israeli determination to secure the release of Gilad Shalit, the IDF private who was held by Hamas for five years.

One post on Facebook read: “Keep saying ‘Death to Israel’ but they freed 1,072 Palestinians in return for the release of one of their own.”

Another admitted: “Yes, I admire Israel. The same Israel they have been wanting to wipe off the map. The same Israel who for five years tirelessly did everything to save one of its soldiers.

Most of the messages were posted abroad, but have been widely discussed in Iran, despite Facebook and Twitter being banned there.

Over the weekend the UN Human Rights Council condemned Israel five times, this
at a time when the slaughter in Syria is continuing, innocent people are being
hung in the Middle East and human rights are being eroded. In many countries
free media are being shut down and the UN Human Rights Council decides to
condemn Israel for closing off a balcony. This is absurd. This march of
hypocrisy is continuing and we will continue to condemn it and expose it.

What makes today's delegitimization of Israel different from classical, historical delegitimization is its masking under the rubric of all that is good, such as the struggle against racism, and doing so under the effective cover of institutions such as the United Nations. This ideological anti-Semitism is much more sophisticated and arguably a more pernicious expression of the new anti-Semitism because it is not expressed in any genocidal incitement against Jews and Israel, which is overt and public and clear.

I'm not sure if I agree with the second sentence. It seems to me that Zionhass, the excessive, obsessive hatred of Israel, can often be both "more sophisticated" in that it cloaks itself in the sheep's clothing of "human rights" as well as genocidal, in that ending the "occupation" (of Israel by Jews), the endgame of the UN "human rights" thugs, would ipso facto entail the mass slaughter of Jewry.

The inability of the climate campaign to ponder whether environmental problems can be solved with means that are compatible with individual liberty, democratic institutions, and market economics is the chief reason they are losing.

Exactly. The "solution" to climate change is antithetical to individual freedom but entirely in synch with authoritarianism of various stripes, a huge part of its appeal for those who long to control stuff (and who like to tell themselves they're on the side of the angels).

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Friday, February 28 marked the 6th annual Sister 2 Sister Conference. This year over 200 grade eight girls from nine Regent Park and surrounding communities' schools participated. The full day conference is for womyn by womyn with the main goal of making connections with positive female role models and acknowledge the incredible womyn leaders in the community.

Do you know anyone who isn't a radical feminist/Marxist who spells it that way? I shoor don't. (Hey, if the Tedious B can change the spelling of common words, so can I.)Here's a poetic tribute to the board's embrace of politicized spelling:My mind is reelin' and spinnin''Cuz the Tedious B spells it "womyn."This radical wordIs clearly absurdAnd will lead to scholastic oblivi'n.Update:The Urban Dictionary 'splains that "womyn" is

the feminist/lesbian spelling of "woman". also has political implications. not all feminists/lesbians use or even like this term, but it's been claimed as a subtle empowerment thing by both groups in general.

A subtle empowerment thing, eh? All of a sudden, I feel a song coming on:We are "womyn" with a "y"'Cuz we don't need any guyTo define us and malign us with an "e".Were we "women" we would beSans a shred of dignity,At the mercy of the bad patriarchy.Yes, we're empowered--Even tho' some wear the veil.No, we haven't coweredAnd our cause will prevail.If we want to We'll misspell everything.We are strong (strong)!We're unassailable!We are "womyn"...

Actually, Si, the "occupation" of Israel by Jews (the only "occupation" the Zion-loathers really care about) is what makes and will perpetuate a living Israel.If anything will spell the end of Israel, it will be a combo of leftist busybodies like Kerry, Obama and their interminable "peace process" along with J Street-type Jewtopians for whom "justice" for Palestinians (the victims di tutti victims) is all consuming.

Those who would silence people who disagree with them (and who believe in a robust, no holds barred discussion) pathologize--and thereby stigmative--their opponents in the hopes that they'll be too embarrassed by their "phobia" to partake in any debate.And "J-Streetphobia"? It's a faux pathology invented by faux Zionists.

A Jewish teacher who was attacked by anti-Semitic assailants in Paris last week recounted the harrowing attack, in which he said three North African men beat him savagely and drew a swastika on his chest after he left a kosher restaurant.

The man, identified only as "David," spoke to the New York-based Jewish newspaper The Algemeiner, which published several photos of him with two black eyes, as well as pictures of the crude Nazi symbol he said was scrawled on him as a sick "marker."

"Often my family and friends who are still in France tend to ignore the rise of anti-Semitism and its danger, but this recent video shows that it’s real.”

“They started to curse me out: ‘dirty Jew,’ ‘death to the Jews,’ ‘son of a b****,’ etc.," the man said of the March 20 attack. "Then they started to beat me up,” David says in a clip before breaking down in tears. “I was hit on my face, I got my nose fractured… And then one of them took something out of his pocket, I thought it was a knife… It was a marker… And this is what they did to me (showing his chest), a swastika as they were screaming ‘dirty Jew.’ ”

Identifying them as "North African" is part of the problem. It is redolent (it stinks, actually) of a cringing political correctness that dares not identify the root of the problem--Muslim antipathy toward Jews that's written into Islamic texts and which has reached new heights of hysterical hatefulness because, in defiance of those texts, Israel exists and thrives.

Notably absent from that list are, not surprisingly, "CNN and The New York Times." For those two media outlets, the refusal to question the adamancies of climate science and an aversion to scrutinizing Barack Obama's flimflams go hand-in-hand.And I'm sure that, just like Lois Lerner, another aficionado of non-transparency, Prof. Mann has absolutely nothing to hide. It behooves us to point out, however, that someone who is so thin-skinned that he's suing Mark Steyn for dissing him and his stick in an insulting way, but who at the same time has a Janus-faced response to the media spotlight, i.e. basking in it when it's worshipful but shunning it when it isn't, can hardly be described as someone with a firm grip on the moral high ground.

The above described media pile on against Prof. Mann and how he's brought it on himself brings to mind a famous biblical quotation: "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind." That final bit was borrowed for Inherit the Wind, the title of the play, and then a movie, about the Scopes Monkey Case. I guess that's fitting, given that the Steyn prosecution is being framed as Scopes redux (although I, for one, have hesitated to see it like that).

A mother, who was thrown in jail and charged with endangering the welfare of a child after breastfeeding her baby while drinking, said she didn’t know she was possibly breaking the law.

“I did drink. I did breastfeed,” Tasha Adams told ABC News’ “20/20” in her first on-camera interview. “I didn’t know it was illegal. If I knew it was illegal, I wouldn’t have done it.”

Last week, Chuck Clawson, the deputy city attorney for Conway, Ark., dropped Adams’ child endangerment charge because there wasn’t enough evidence to prove she had one too many drinks to care for her child.

The 28-year-old is a stay-at-home mother to her three children: 6-year-old Cal, 2-year-old Hyd, and 8-month-old Ana. Adams and her family live in Toad Suck, Ark., a small town where alcohol is banned. But unlike Toad Suck, Conway, Ark., is not a dry town...

The legitimacy of China’s leaders today depends, in part, on their ability to make their country’s power system greener so their people can breathe. Putin’s legitimacy depends on keeping Russia and the world addicted to oil and gas. Whom do you want to bet on?

Actually, I want to bet on neither. I want to depend on ourselves and on the abundant natural resources--the oil, the natural gas--were have in our your backyard.I want to bet on the Keystone XL pipeline. Too bad Obama and Friedman, those brainiacs, refuse to do the same.

Speaking of betting, Tom's the one who bet big on the Arab Spring--and lost his shirt. Naturally, he's forgotten all about it since he starts this column with this "insight":

One thing I learned covering the Middle East for many years is that there is “the morning after” and there is “the morning after the morning after.” Never confuse the two.

The morning after a big event is when fools rush in and declare that someone’s victory or defeat in a single battle has “changed everything forever.” The morning after the morning after, the laws of gravity start to apply themselves; things often don’t look as good or as bad as you thought.

It took an awful lot of mornings after the morning after for Tom to wake up and see that the Arab Spring was a big old bust. I wouldn't bet on his being any smarter on the subject of Russia, China and renewable and non-renewable energy.

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

This CJN article is so poorly written that's it's a challenge to untangle exactly what it's about. After two complete read-throughs, here's my conclusion: it amounts to support for the government, which wants to pass an anti-"cyber-bullying" law, and which, since it would extend our already far too extensive "hate speech" laws, sounds to me like terrible idea to me. Once again, however, Official Jewdom is lining up on the wrong side of the free speech issue. It wants the law to pass because it thinks it will protect Jewry from "racist and xenophic" hate speech/propaganda. On the other side--the side that wants to defend free expression--are a bunch of pro-Palestinian advocates who are worried that, should the law pass, they won't get to express their Zionhass (they wouldn't call it that, but I would), and who, somewhat hysterically and pathologically, believe that the law is nothing more that a Conservative government conspiracy to silence them and other critics of Israel.You would think that by now the Jews would have figured out that those "hate speech" laws do not protect them; that, in fact, what they do do is end up silencing Jews and empowering their enemies, especially those of the Leftist/Islamist persuasion who despise the Jewish state and its supporters. You would think that at some point--maybe, say, after B'nai Brith Canada endured a lengthy "hate speech" prosecution -- they would have twigged to the reality that state efforts to hobble free speech are not only not, as they say, good for the Jews, they are catastrophic for the larger society. How so? They result in society having to mind its manners and stifle its "blasphemy." In other words, in a free society becoming less free and, ultimately, not free at all.That is something that sails right over the head of the Official Jew quoted in the CJC piece. Re the pro-Palestinian group's concerns,

“These people must also think Elvis, JFK and Marilyn Monroe are residing on a desert island somewhere,” Richard Marceau, CIJA’s general counsel and senior government adviser, said in a phone interview from Ottawa.

He emphasized what is being proposed as a change to Bill C-13, the federal government’s proposed cyberbullying law, “is nothing new. It just brings into line, with several provincial antibullying and hate laws, section 718.2, subsection A, subsection I of the Criminal Code of Canada.”

Well, if those particular sections and subsections are involved, I guess there's nothing to worry about. ;)I realize that the Nazis trash-talked the Jews, and then murdered them during the Holocaust. But isn't it a better idea to allow our local Zion-loathers to bloviate away in their uber-zany manner so that A) we can see that they're crazy and B) we are free to rebut them? When, oh, when, will Official Jews finally figure out--and, yes, I realize that for them it's counterintuitive--that climbing aboard the Shut Up Express is not the way to go?

[I]t’s time to just say it. The obsession of Barack Obama and John Kerry with
forcing along a discredited and unproductive “peace process” involving the
Palestinian Arabs and Israel is weird – even creepy.

That said, it's no more creepy than, say, telling people that you have the power to personally turn back rising oceans and bring health care coverage to all of America's uninsured.Speaking of creepy...:It's creepy and obsessive,Revolting and excessive,Extremely unimpressive,"Peace process" lunacy.It's turned into a cudgel.Obama thinks a nudge'llPush Bibi so he'll budge.It's "peace process" lunacy...

The new puppy--he's now 9 I/2 weeks old--is mostly a joy. During the day he's happy, playful, as sweet as can be, and, of course, adorable. Temperament-wise, he's much calmer than our first two dogs. He is already being trained to do "sit" and "down," and is picking it up fairly quickly. He recognizes his name, never wanders when I take him outside to do his business, and follows me up the deck stairs once he's done.Here's the problem--and it's a doozie: He still hates his crate. And his interminable yips, moans and cries when he's placed there at night have translated into much sleeplessness for me and my husband. (My teenaged son, thankfully, has somehow managed to sleep through it all.)The days and days of sleeplessness have triggered a wicked case of insomnia--mine. I've have trouble with sleeplessness in the past; at the best of times, my sleep is a delicate thing. However, I haven't experienced this kind of insomnia--the kind that feels as though an electrical current is running through you; the kind that takes on a life of its own and is thus next to impossible to curb--in 17 years.So if you happen to notice more typos than usual in my blog posts, or if my thoughts seem more scattered, or if my productivity suddenly declines, you'll know why.

It's the Jewish one who, although he's an American who has never resided in Israel, writes for the Jerusalem Post.You can understand the Saudi king's feelings. He doesn't want any Jew/Zionist cooties to pollute his holy-shmoly turf.If press corps members had any stones/spine/integrity, they would condemn such egregious Jew-hate and decline to go along unless their Jewish colleague could, too.But since, obviously, they don't (have any s/s/i), they won't (decline to go).

In pre-withdrawal Afghanistan, the celebration of International Women's Day took place inside the heavily guarded New Kabul Compound. It was an upbeat event, at least according to a Defense Department report, featuring several laudable and prominent Afghan women doctors, who naturally talked up education and the need to retain post-Taliban gains made on behalf of women in Afghanistan. Tragically, the State Department's most recent report on the shockingly low state of human rights in Afghanistan reveals that such gains for women -- not to mention children, boys and girls alike -- are already mainly on paper only. As the armed utopians withdraw, the dust of tribal Islam settles.

The elites who take International Women's Day seriously, however, probably won't ever notice. Consider the one American woman who spoke at the Kabul event, Rear Adm. Althea H. Coetzee. As director of U.S. Forces Afghanistan, operational contract support, Coetzee has a big job, a hefty salary, status and power that few women -- or men, for that matter -- achieve anywhere in the world. But she, too, the Defense Department report noted, took to the same podium as the Afghan women who preceded her, to speak of her "challenges beginning with her graduating in the sixth class of women at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1985."

Poor thing. I wonder what the Afghan women really thought of Coetzee's "challenges" -- being among an early class of women at the elite military academy -- in comparison to the challenges of their countrywomen -- violence and degradation suffered at the hands not only of criminals and outlaws, but, as the State Department report makes plain, policemen and judges and other officials, too. As "international women," they all can relate, right?

LONDON – The British Muslim community has been facing growing challenges surrounding adoption and foster caring after the religious minority was shocked by a recent decision to allow placing a young Muslim girl permanently into the care of a lesbian couple.

“If it is always preferable to place a child with carers who share a similar ethnic and religious background, realities on the ground do not always put us in a position to do so,” Faith Harlow, who works as a social worker in East Sussex, told OnIslam.net.

According to Harlow, demand has been growing every year for Muslim carers to come forth.

But, really, how feasible is that?

“Many Muslims are very religiously confused when it comes to adoption and foster-caring. But beyond that there is a real problem of social stigmatization, a fear associated with caring for a non-blood relative.” Imam Abdullah Shah from London told OnIslam.

When someone invokes the experiences of Native North Americans in order to claim commonalities with us, it’s almost always in order to demonise another country. In the majority of cases I see, it’s Arabs or white people trying to demonise Israel, first by calling them colonisers, and second by inferring that they stole the land on which they built their state. The irony should be obvious.

What I have learned after years of study is that if there is one people in the entire world who can legitimately claim commonalities with us, it is not the descendants of 7th century conquerors who were ascendant for 600 years, until the past century, when the cycle was reversed. The Arab Muslims who dominated the region after conquering it are the furthest thing from my people. Rather, our fraternity here is with the people who only recent underwent a real genocide and who have still managed to maintain their cultural integrity. That people are the Jewish nation. I do not say this lightly; it comes after years of research, years of speaking to and listening to survivors both of residential schools and the Holocaust. It is not a comparison of tragedies, nor is it a contest; rather, it is about empathy and understanding through common experience.

“When you are hunched over your dining room table in coming weeks,” said [Enright] “buried in paper, your stomach in knots, and your head swimming, here’s a sobering fact: 26 of the most powerful and profitable Fortune 500 companies paid zero dollars in federal income tax for the five years 2008 to 2012.” Boeing, General Electric, Verizon — all paid “nothing” in income taxes. “And the craziest part,” added Mr. Enright, “it wasn’t illegal. No one is going to jail.”

Spanish police also arrested Chafik Jalel Ben Amara Elmedjeri, a Tunisian immigrant previously arrested in February 2006 for recruiting jihadists to fight American troops in Iraq.

Elmedjeri, a specialist in forging documents, is also known for operating one of the best kebab shops in Málaga. Terrorism analysts say this points to another problem: many of the tens of thousands of kebab and shawarma shops operating in Spain and other parts of Europe may be using their business proceeds actively to finance global jihad in Syria and elsewhere.

One wonders how many--if any--kebab/shawarma shops in Toronto and other North American cities have a similar business plan.

What was Abu Toameh’s conclusion about this misdirected effort to support the
Palestinian cause? “What is happening on the U.S. campuses,” he wrote, “is not
about supporting the Palestinians as much as it is about promoting hatred for
the Jewish state. It is not really about ending the ‘occupation’ as much as it
is about ending the existence of Israel.” And, he added, “we should not be
surprised if the next generation of jihadists comes not from the Gaza Strip or
the mountains and mosques of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but from university
campuses across the U.S.”

Climate change deniers are as committed. Their denial fits perfectly with their support for free market economics, opposition to state intervention and hatred of all those latte-slurping, quinoa-munching liberals, with their arrogant manners and dainty hybrid cars, who presume to tell honest men and women how to live. If they admitted they were wrong on climate change, they might have to admit that they were wrong on everything else and their whole political identity would unravel.

The politicians know too well that beyond the corporations and the cultish fanatics in their grass roots lies the great mass of people, whose influence matters most. They accept at some level that manmade climate change is happening but don't want to think about it.

I am no better than them. I could write about the environment every week. No editor would stop me. But the task feels as hopeless as arguing against growing old. Whatever you do or say, it is going to happen. How can you persuade countries to accept huge reductions in their living standards to limit (not stop) the rise in temperatures? How can you persuade the human race to put the future ahead of the present?

Well, maybe if the science was based on something other than flawed computer models that have been tweaked to produce an alarming result people would be willing to put up with the prescribed punishment, I mean remedy.As for the idea that the quinoa-deploring "deniers" have won--try telling that to Mark Steyn, who's being sued for libel by one of the world's foremost scientific Chicken Littles (a man who is far more "committed" to his cause than any so-called denier).BTW: quinoa--yum!

One possible interpretation [as to why Republicans aren't on board with the "settled science"] is that Republicans are just plain worse than Democrats at absorbing and understanding science. That's absurd, and Democrats who reach that conclusion will only make this debate harder to resolve.

Another possibility is that Republicans are being deceived, whether by their news outlets, their opinion leaders or their political representatives. That's a tempting conclusion, but it feels too limited. Sure, liberals and conservatives watch different television stations, but they're not living in different countries. The gaps picked up by Gallup suggest some deeper division.

A third interpretation is that political preferences have leaked into the perception of fact. Republicans may conflate the existence of climate change with the need for more government. Rather than relax their objection to government, maybe it's easier to look for reasons to think that climate change isn't happening, or isn't serious.

Maybe easing Republicans' resistance to the idea of climate change will require easing their resistance to the idea of government as an occasional force for good.

Maybe so. And maybe being able to see that the left has politicized the science for their own ends will require easing resistance to the idea that Republicans are invariably and inherently blind/wrong/wicked.

Despite conceding that a recent case of "microaggression" on a university campus was way overblown, the "m" word--it supposedly describes covert racism that is so subtle that it's barely perceptible and yet is considered so insidious that it MUST. BE. ROOTED. OUT. NOW!-- is making great strides these days. See, for example, this, this, this and this and it becomes immediately clear that, in the absence of genuine racism, universities, those little enclaves of totalitarianism and conformity, have had to settle for a war on manufactured hatred--a hate that exists solely in PC-addled minds.Sigh. It kind of makes you long for the days when the kids swallowed goldfish and tried to cram as many warm bodies as possible into a phone booth.

Saturday, March 22, 2014

A U.N. human rights investigator accused Israel on Friday of "ethnic cleansing" in pushing Palestinians out of East Jerusalem and cast doubt that the Israeli government could accept a Palestinian state in the current climate.

He spoke against a backdrop of deadlocked peace talks and accelerating Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem which Palestinians say is dimming their hope of establishing a viable state on contiguous territory.

Israel says Palestinian refusal to recognize it as a Jewish state is the main obstacle. U.S. President Barack Obama this week pressed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to help break the impasse, saying both sides must take political risks before the April 29 deadline for a framework deal.

Richard Falk, United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, told a news conference that Israeli policies bore "unacceptable characteristics of colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing".

Spoken by a creep whose thinking manifests unacceptable characteristics of far leftist know-nothingism and the over-the-top hatred of a Jew-loathing Jew.Update: Exactly how crazy is Richard Falk? He's so bonkers that he blamed the Boston Marathon terrorism on Israel.

The imam cupped his palms before his face and invited the congregation to pray. “Oh Allah, return to us those who are lost. Oh, Allah, grant safe passage to MH370,” he said.

The prayer was not unusual. The setting was.

Gathered in the courtyard of a shopping mall in a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, the Muslim religious leader was followed by a Christian reading from the Bible, then a Buddhist monk, a Hindu and finally a Taoist priest echoing the imam’s pleas before hundreds of worshippers in a largely Muslim country where religious intolerance has been on the rise.

The baffling mystery over the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 with 239 people on March 8 has united Malaysia, a nation of numerous ethnicities, as never before in recent memory.

Tuesday night’s interfaith ceremony would have been inconceivable 11 days ago in the country of 28 million people where religious differences and bigotry have often been on open display. For Malaysians the sight of non-Muslims bowing respectfully as Imam Hilman Nordin said prayers from the rostrum was an incredible step toward unity. While there have been interfaith prayers before, they have always been without a Muslim representative.

Malays, who account for about 60 percent of the population, are almost exclusively Muslim. Chinese, who are Buddhists, Christians and Taoists, represent about 21 percent, while Indians, who are Hindus, Sikhs and Christians, are about 7 percent...

Gee, I wonder how long it'll last:

Muslims have been at loggerheads with Christians and Hindus in recent years, and some sermons last month identified Christians and Jews as enemies of Islam. Hard-line Muslims have called for the burning of Bibles and in January firebombs were thrown into a church compound. A few years ago, a group of Muslims stomped on the severed head of a cow outside a Hindu temple. Cows are sacred to Hindus.

BATON ROUGE, La. – Louisiana welfare recipients will be prohibited from spending the federal assistance at lingerie shops, tattoo parlors, nail salons and jewelry stores, under new limits enacted by state social services officials.

The Department of Children and Family Services announced the emergency regulations late Thursday. They cover the Family Independence Temporary Assistance Program — commonly known as welfare benefits — and the Kinship Care Subsidy Program.

Both programs pay cash assistance to low-income families for items like food, clothing and housing.

DCFS Secretary Suzy Sonnier said the agency decided to ban the use of electronic benefit cards, which work as debit cards, at stores that don't sell items that are considered basic needs for families...

Hey, for some people, tats, French manicures and Victoria's Secret are a necessity. Why should these folks be deprived simply because they don't have the means to pay for them?

You can find it here:Higgledy-piggledyHerr Rektor HeideggerSaid to his studentsTo Being Be TrueLest you should fall intoInauthenticityThis I believe—And the Führer does too!Considering that Hannah Arendt was once the Herr Rektor's lover and that she almost singlehandedly rehabilitated his reputation after the war, it seems only proper that she have a higgledy-piggledy, too:Higgledy-piggledyHeidegger's pupil sheSaid Eichmann's evilWas awf'ly "banal."Blamed her own people forTheir own destruction andShilled for her H.—She was that sort of gal!

No? Then how to account for this, an editorial insisting that there's wiggle room for Ontario's Preem 'Leen (who, were she a CEO in the private sector, would have been handed her walking papers long ago for financial mismanagement/sheer incompetence) to raise our taxes?

Earlier this week, President Obama sent a celebratory message to the people and the leaders of Iran on the occasion of the Nowruz, the Persian New Year. The annual videotaped presidential missive was very much in the spirit of the administration’s policy toward Iran emphasizing not only holiday cheer but also a belief in the need for the U.S. and Iran to resolve their differences, especially with regard to the nuclear negotiations now going on. In doing so, the president went even further than previous statements about the talks in which he said he supported a peaceful Iranian nuclear program and predicted a deal that would strengthen the economy of the Islamist regime. Israeli President Shimon Peres also sent his own equally conciliatory message to Iran that emphasized peace.

But if either leader were expecting a friendly reply from Iran’s Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, they were disappointed. Speaking earlier today to commemorate the holiday, Khamenei brushed off conciliation, attacking the idea of a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, questioning the Holocaust and vowing to triumph over international sanctions...

You mean the well-wishers' well-wishing and wishful thinking isn't enough to wish away Khamenei's malicousness?I know: next time they should try saying "pretty please with sugar on top." That's sure to turn the Ayatollah's frown upside down. ;)

Oh, dear. What an unfortunate "misunderstanding". The gentleman had called the Female Genital Mutilation Helpline thinking it was a helpline set up by Her Majesty's Government to help you find someone to genitally mutilate your daughters. In the rich, vibrant diversity of the modern multicultural state, it's easy to see why the poor fellow might make that assumption. Just give it a couple more years, sir.

Years? In terribly "accommodating" Old Blighty, I give it a couple more months, tops.

I'm so sleep deprived due to an adorable puppy who has no love for his crate (mind you, he does seem to be getting more used to it; last night he stayed in it for several hours without much complaint) that I read this as "Chinese dog breeder sells Taliban mastiff twins to property developer for $3 million."My little pup weighs around 13 lbs. I wouldn't care to speculate about the combined weight of the year-old mastiffs.The new owner had better have two gigantic crates--and fingers crossed that the massive ones aren't averse to them.Going by photos of the hyper-hirsute breed, I'd say he's going to need a really good vacuum cleaner, too.

The last chapter of the book deals with what the book calls "Climategate". Here, the author compares several e-mails to the evidence he presents in The Hockey Stick Illusion. Montford focuses on those e-mails dealing with the peer review process and how these pertained to Stephen McIntyre's efforts to obtain the data and methodology from Mann's and other paleoclimatologists' published works.[11]

The suit filed by Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, claims that the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) libeled him in a pair of articles in which they stated he had manipulated climate data and that the fraud had been covered up by his employer, which said its investigation concluded he had done nothing wrong. To make the point, the CEI writer, Rand Simberg, drew a comparison between Penn State's handling of abuse allegations against Jerry Sandusky - the university's longtime assistant football coach convicted as a child molester - and its review of Mann's work.

"Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data," Simberg wrote in the article Mann says is libelous.

Mark Steyn, a writer with National Review Online, wrote about the Simberg article and tossed in his own thoughts. While at first openly shying away from the Sandusky metaphor, Steyn called some of Mann's most prominent work "fraudulent" - a graph of historical temperatures showing rapid rises in modern times, which is widely known as the "hockey stick." Then Steyn returned to the references to the child molester.

"Graham Spanier, the Penn State president forced to resign over Sandusky, was the same [person] who investigated Mann," Steyn wrote. "And, as with Sandusky...the college declined to find one of its star names guilty of any wrongdoing." He went on to say that the investigation "was a joke."

Ugly stuff. Accusations of scientific fraud, lies, cover-ups and then comparisons with some of the most horrific crimes imaginable. Because of the prominence of his research in climate change science, similar - though rarely so caustic - attacks had been leveled at Mann for years by skeptics. But circumstances had changed. Not only had the two writers gone further than most by creating an equivalence between Mann and an infamous child molester, but they appear to have done so at the worst possible time.

For months before those articles, Mann and other climatologists had been speaking among themselves about the need to start fighting back against the attacks on their work and their character. The science is on their side, they argue, and by not responding aggressively against the skeptics, they have allowed the discussion to become derailed. And if critics have slandered or libeled them, they shouldn't stand for it.

"If we don't step up to the plate, we leave a vacuum [for] those with an ax to grind," Mann says, while cautioning that he would not specifically address the lawsuit. Mann has no doubt some critics are advancing their positions honestly, but he believes that responding to bad-faith attacks on climatologists and their work is "a call to arms to our fellow scientists. We should not apologize for trying to inform that discussion." ...

"Inform" it? Or dominate it?

Update: It occurs to me that Steyn wouldn't be in this pickle if Mann were a professor at some other university. Were he on the faculty of, say, UCLA, Simberg and Steyn would never have thought to allude to Jerry Sandusky, formerly of Penn State, where Mann continues to work. But for that unserendipitous pairing, Mann would likely not have had the ammo (feeble as it is) to launch his court action.

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Scaramouche is my nom de Web. My real name is Mindy G. Alter, and I like to think of myself as a free speecher with a sense of humour. My bailiwick: fighting on behalf of all the good things that free speech helps safeguard, and doing my utmost to highlight the malevolence and imbicilities of those who oppose freedom, whomever they may be.